The Occupational Group
Chapter XXXI
Political Pluralism and The True Federal State

IN the last two chapters I have taken up the two fundamental laws of life -- the law of interpenetration and the law of multiples. (1) Sovereignty, we have seen, is the power generated within the group -- dependent on the principle of interpenetration. (2) Man joins many groups -- in order to express his multiple nature. These two principles give us federalism.

Let us, before considering the conception of federalism in detail, sum up in a few sentences what has already been said of these two principles. The fundamental truth of life we have seen is self-perpetuating activity -- activity so regnant, so omnipresent, so all-embracing, that it banishes even the conception of anything static from the world of being. Conscious evolution means that we must discover the essential principle of this activity and see that it is at work in the humblest of its modes, the smallest group or
meeting of even two or three. The new psychology has brought to political science the recognition of interpenetration and the "compounding of consciousness" as the very condition of all life.
Our political methods must conform to life's methods. We must understand and follow the laws of association that the state may appear, that our own little purposes may be fulfilled. _Little_ purposes? Is there any great and small? The humblest man and the price of his daily loaf -- is this a small matter -- it hangs upon the whole world situation to-day. In order that the needs of the humblest shall be satisfied, or in order that world purposes shall be fulfilled -- it matters not which -- this principle of "compounding" must be fully recognized and embodied in our political methods. It is this vital intermingling which creates the real individual and knits men into the myriad relations of life. We win through life our individuality, it is not presented to us at the beginning to be exploited as we will. We win a multiple individuality through our manifold relations. In the workings of this dual law are rooted all of social and political progress, all
the hope and the potency of human evolution.

Only the federal state can express this dual principle of existence -- the compounding and the multiple compounding. It is an incomplete understanding of this dual law which is responsible
for the mistaken interpretation of federalism held by some of the pluralists: a conception which includes the false doctrines of division of power, the idea that the group not the individual should be the unit of the state, the old consent of governed theory, an almost discarded particularism (group rights), and the
worn-out balance theory.

The distributive sovereignty school assumes that the essential, the basic part of federalism is the division of power between the central and separate parts: while the parts may be considered as ceding power to the central state, or the central state may be considered as granting power to the parts, yet in one form or
another federalism means a divided sovereignty. Esmein says definitely, "L'Etat fe'de'ratif. . . fractionne la souverainete' .... " [1]. No, it should unite sovereignty. There should be no absolute division of power or conferring of power. The activity of whole and parts should be one.

1. Quoted by Duguit.

In spite of all our American doctrines of the end of the eighteenth century, in spite of our whole history of states-right theory and sentiment, the division of sovereignty is not the main fact of the United States government. From 1789 to 1861 the idea of a divided sovereignty -- that the United States was a voluntary agreement between free, sovereign and independent states, that authority was "divided" between nation and states -- dictated the history of the United States. The war of 1861 was fought (some of
the pluralists seem not to know) to settle this question [1]. The two ideas of federalism came to a death grapple in our Civil War and the true doctrine triumphed. That war decided that the United States was not a delegated affair, that it had a "real" existence, and that it was sovereign, yet not sovereign over the states as an external party, for it is composed of the states, but sovereign over itself, merely over itself. You have not to be a mystic to understand this but only an American. Those who see in a federal union a mere league with rights and powers granted to a central government, those who see in a federal union a balancing of sovereign powers, do not understand true federalism. When we enumerate the powers of the states as distinct from the powers of our national government, some people regard this distinction as a
dividing line between nation and states, but the true "federalist" is always seeing the relation of these powers to those of the central government. There are no absolute divisions in a true federal union.

1. It must be remembered, however, that while in the Civil War we definitely gave up the compact theory held by us since the Mayflower compact, yet we did not adopt the organism theory.
The federal state we have tried and are trying to work out in America is based on the principles of psychic unity described in chapter X. The giving up of the "consent" theory does not bring us necessarily to the organic theory of society.

Do we then want a central government which shall override the parts until they become practically non-existent? The moment federalism attempts to transcend the parts it has become vitiated.
Our Civil War was not, as some writers assert, the blow to states- rights and the victory of centralization. We shall yet, I believe, show that it was a victory for true federalism [1]. The United States is neither to ignore the states, transcend the states, nor to balance the states, it is to _be_ the states in their united
capacity.

1. Duguit says that the United States confers the rights of a state on a territory. No, it recognizes that which already exists.

Of course it is true that many Americans do think of our government as a division of powers between central and local authority, therefore there is as a matter of fact much balancing of interests. But as far as we are doing this at Washington it is exactly what we must get rid of. The first lesson for every member
of a federal government to learn is that the interests of the different parts, or the interests of the whole and the interests of the parts, are never to be pitted against each other. As far as the United States represents an interpenetration of thought and feeling and interest and will, it is carrying out the aims of federalism.

We have not indeed a true federalism in the United States to-day; we are now learning the lesson of federalism. Some one must analyze for us the difference between centralization and true federalism,
which is neither nationalization, states-rights, nor balance, and then we must work for true federalism. For the federal government to attempt to do that which the states should do, or perhaps even are doing, means loss of force, and loss of education-by-experience for the states. On the other hand, not to see when federal action means at the same time local development and national strength, means a serious retarding of our growth. It is equally true that when the states attempt what the federal government alone should undertake, the consequence is general muddle.

And it is by no means a question only of what the federal government should do and what it should not do. It is a question of the _way_ of doing. It is a question of guiding, where necessary, without losing local initiative or local responsibility. It is a question of so framing measures that true federation, not centralization, be obtained. Recently, even before the war, the tendency has been towards increased federal action and federal control, as seen, for instance, in the control of railroad transportation, of vocational education etc. The latter is an excellent example of the possibility of central action being true
federal and not nationalized action. The federal government upon application from a state grants to that state an amount for vocational education equal to what the state itself will appropriate. The administration of the fund rests with the state. The federal government thus makes no assumptions. It _recognizes
existing facts_. And it does not impose something from without. The state must understand its needs, must know how those needs can best be satisfied; it must take responsibility. The experience of one state joins with the experience of other states to form a collective experience.

As we watch federalism being worked out in actual practice at Washington, we see in that practice the necessity of a distinction which has been emphasized throughout this book as the contribution of contemporary psychology to politics: nationalization is the Hegelian reconciliation, true federalism is the integration of present psychology. This means a genuine integration of the interests of all the parts. If our present tendency is towards nationalization, we must learn the difference between that and federalism and change it into the latter. We need a new order of statesmen in the world to-day -- for our nation, for our
international league -- those who understand federalism.

But I have been talking of federalism as the integration of parts (the states). We should remember also, and this is of the greatest importance, that the United States is not only to be the _states_ in their united capacity, but it is to be all the men and women of the United States in _their_ united capacity. This it seems difficult for many Europeans to understand; it breaks across their traditional conception of federalism which has been a league, a confederation of "sovereign" parts, not a true federal state. We of
Massachusetts feel ourselves not first children of Massachusetts and then through Massachusetts of the United States. We belong directly to the United States not merely through Massachusetts.
True federalism means that the individual, not the group, is the unit. A true federal government acts directly on its citizens, not merely through the groups.

America has not led the world in democracy through methods of representation, social legislation, ballot laws or industrial organization. She has been surpassed by other countries in all of these. She leads the world in democracy because through federalism she is working out the secret of the universe actively. Multiple citizenship in its spontaneous unifying is the foundation of the new state. Federalism and democracy go together, you do not decide to have one or the other as your fancy may be. We did not establish federalism in the United States, we are growing federalism.
Cohesion imposed upon us externally will lack in significance and duration. Federalism must live through: (1) the reality of the group, (2) the expanding group, (3) the ascending group or unifying process.

The federal state is the unifying state. The political pluralists, following James, use the "trailing and" [1] argument to prove that we can never have a unified state, that there is always something which never gets included. I should use it to prove that we can and must have a unifying state, that this "and" is the very
unifying principle. The "trailing and" is the deepest truth of psychology. It is because of this "and" that our goal must always be the unified state -- the unified state to be attained through the federal form. Our spirit it is true is by nature federal, but this means not infinite unrelation but infinite possibility of relation, not infinite strung-alongness but infinite seeking for the unifying of the strung-alongness. I forever discover undeveloped powers. This is the glory of our exhaustless nature. We are the expression of the principle of endless growth, of endless appearing, and democracy must, therefore, so shape its forms as to allow for the manifestation of each new appearing. I grow possibilities; new opportunities should always be arising to meet these new possibilities.

1. "The word 'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. . . . The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom." "A Pluralistic Universe," 321-322.

Then through group and group and ascending group I actualize more and more. The "trailing and" is man's task for ever and ever -- to drag in more spirit, more knowledge, more harmony. Federalism is the only possible form for the state because it leaves room for the new forces which are coming through these spiritual "ands," for the myriad centres of life which must be forever springing up, group after group, within a vital state. Our impulse is at one and the same time to develop self and to transcend self. It is this ever
transcending self which needs the federal state. The federal state is not a unified state, I agree, but it is a unifying state, not a "strung-along" state.

Thus it is the federal state which expresses the two fundamental principles of life -- the compounding of consciousness and the endless appearings of new forces.

I have said that the pluralists' mistaken interpretation of federalism includes the particularist notions of "consent" and "rights" and "balance," and that all these come from a false conception of sovereignty. What does the new psychology teach us of "consent"? Power is generated within the true group not by one or
several assuming authority and the others "consenting," but solely by the process of intermingling. Only by the same method can the true state be grown.

If divorce is to be allowed between the state and this group or that, what are the grounds on which it is to be granted? Will incompatibility be sufficient? Are the manufacturing north and agricultural south of Ireland incompatible? Does a certain trade association want, like Nora, a "larger life"? The pluralists open
the gates to too much. They wish to throw open the doors of the state to labor: yes, they are right, but let them beware what veiled shapes may slip between those open portals. Labor must indeed be included in the state, it is our most immediate task, but let us ponder well the method.

The pluralists assume that the unified state must always claim authority over "other groups" [1].

1. When they say that the passion for unity is the urge for a dominant One, they think of the dominant One as outside.

But as he who expresses the unity of my group has no authority over me but is simply the symbol and the organ of the group, so that group which expresses the unity of all groups -- that is, the state -- should have no authority _as a separate group_, but only so far as it gathers up into itself the whole meaning of these constituent groups. Just here is the crux of the disagreement between the upholders of the pluralistic and of the true monistic state: the former think of the other groups as "coextensive" or "complementary" to the state -- the state is one of the groups to which we owe obedience; to the latter they and all individuals are
the constituents of the state [1].

1. One of the pluralists says, "I cannot see that . . . sovereignty is the unique property of any one association."
No, not sovereignty over "others," but sovereignty always belongs to any genuine group; as groups join to form another real group, the sovereignty of the more inclusive group is evolved -- that is the only kind of state sovereignty which we can recognize as legitimate. (See ch. XXIX on "Political Pluralism and Sovereignty.")

I have said that our progress is from Contract to Community [2].
This those pluralists cannot accept who take the consent of the group as part of their theory of the state. They thereby keep themselves in the contract stage of thinking, they thereby and in so far range themselves with all particularists [3].

2. See ch. XV.

3. Mr. Laski is an exception to many writers on "consent."
When he speaks of consent he is referring only to the actual facts of to-day. Denying the sovereignty postulated by the lawyers (he says you can never find in a community any one will which is certain of obedience), he shows that as a matter of fact the state sovereignty we have now rests on consent. I
do not wish to confuse the issue between facts of the present and hopes for the future, but I wish to make a distinction between the "sovereignty" of the present and the sovereignty which I hope we can grow. This distinction is implicit in Mr. Laski's book, but it is lacking in much of the writing on the "consent of the governed."

Secondly, in the divided sovereignty theory the old particularist doctrine of individual rights gives way merely to a new doctrine of group rights, the "inherent rights" of trade-unions or ecclesiastical bodies. "Natural rights" and "social compact" went together; the "inherent rights" of groups again tend to make the
federal bond a compact [1]. The state resting on a numerical basis, composed of an aggregate of individuals, gives way only to a state still resting on a numerical basis although composed now of groups
instead of individuals. As in the old days the individuals were to be "free," now the groups are to be "independent." These new particularists are as zealous and as jealous for the group as any nineteenth-century "individualist" was for the individual. Mr. Barker, who warns us, it is true, against inherent rights which are not adjusted to other inherent rights, nevertheless says, "If we are individualists now, we are corporate individualists. Our individuals are becoming groups. We no longer write Man _vs_. the State but The Group _vs_. the State." But does Mr. Barker really think it progress to write Group _vs_. the State ~ If the principle of individual _vs_. the state is wrong, what difference does it make whether that individual is one man or a group of men? In so far as these rights are based on function, we have an advance in political theory; in so far as we can talk of group _vs_. the state, we are held in the thralls of another form of social atomism. It is the pluralists themselves who are always saying, when they oppose crowd-sovereignty, that atomism means anarchy.
Agreed, but atomism in any form, of groups as well as individuals, means anarchy, and this they do not always seem to realize.

1. Wherever you have the social contract theory in any form, and assent as the foundation of power, there is no social process going on; the state is an arbitrary creation of men.
Group organization to-day must give up any taint whatever of the social contract and rest squarely and fully on its legitimate psychological basis.

Mr. Barker speaks of the present tendency "to restrict the activity of the state in order to safeguard the rights of the groups." Many pluralists and syndicalists are afraid of the state because for them the old dualism is unsolvable. But as I have tried to show in the chapter on "Our Political Dualism" that the rights
of the state and the citizen are never, ideally, incompatible, so now we should understand that our present task is to develop those political forms within which rights of group and state can be approaching coincidence.

As long as we settle down within any one group, we are in danger of the old particularism. Many a trade unionist succumbs to this danger. Love of a group will not get us out of particularism. We can have egoism of the group as well as egoism of the individual.
Indeed the group may have all the evils of the individual -- aggrandizement of self, exploitation of others etc. Nothing will get us out of particularism but the constant recognition that any whole is always the element of a larger whole. Group life has two meanings, one as important as the other: (1) it looks in to its own integrated, coordinated activity, (2) it sees that activity in relation to other activities, in relation to a larger whole of which it is a part. The group which does not look out deteriorates into caste. The group which thinks only of itself is a menace to society; the group which looks to its manifold relations is part of
social progress. President Wilson as head of a national group has just as clear a duty to other national groups as to his own country.

Particularism of the individual is dead, in theory if not in practice. Let us not now fall into the specious error of clinging to our particularism while changing its name from individual to group.

The outcome of group particularism is the balance of power theory, perhaps the most pernicious part of the pluralists' doctrine. The pluralist state is to be composed of sovereign groups. What is their life to be? They are to be left alone to fight, to compete, or, word most favored by this school, to balance. With de Maeztu the balance of power is confessedly the corner-stone of the new state. "The dilemma which would make us choose between the State and anarchy is false. There is another alternative, that of plurality and the balance of powers, not merely within the nation but in the family of nations" [1].

1. This is perhaps a remnant of the nineteenth-century myth that competition is the mode of progress.

But whenever you have balance in your premise, you have anarchy in your conclusion.

The weakness of the reasoning involved in the balance of power argument has been exposed in so much of the war literature of the last three years, which has exploded the balance of power theory between nations, that little further criticism is needed here.
Unity must be our aim today. When you have not unity, you have balance or struggle or domination -- of one over others. The nations of Europe refuse domination, aim at balance, and war is the result.

It seems curious that these two movements should be going on side by side: that we are giving up the idea of the balance of nations, that we are refusing to think any longer in terms of "sovereign" nations, and yet at the same time an increasing number of men should be advocating balancing, "sovereign" groups within nations.
The pluralists object to unity, but unity and plurality are surely not incompatible. The true monistic state is merely the multiple state working out its own unity from infinite diversity. But the unifying state shows us what to do with that diversity. What advantage is that diversity if it is to be always "competing," "fighting," "balancing?" Only in the unifying state do we get the full advantage of diversity where it is gathered up into
significance and pointed action.

The practical outcome of the balance theory will be first antagonistic interests, then jealous interests, then competing interests, then dominating interests -- a fatal climax.

The trouble with the balance theory is that by the time the representatives of the balancing groups meet, it is too late to expect agreement. The chief objection to pluralism is, perhaps, that it is usually merely a scheme of representation, that its advocates are usually talking of the kind of roof they want before
they have laid the foundation stones. No theory of the state can have vitality which is merely a plan of representation. The new state must rest on a new conception of living, on a true understanding of the vital modes of association. The reason why occupational representation must bring balance and competition is
because the integrating of differences, the essential social process, does not take place far enough back in our life. If Parliaments are composed of various groups or interests, the unification of those interests has to take place in Parliament. But then it is too late. The ideas of the different groups must mingle earlier than Parliament. We must go further back than our legislatures for the necessary unifying. We do not want
legislatures full of opposing interests. The ideas of the groups become too crystallized by the time their representatives get to the Parliament, in fact they have often hardened into prejudices.
Moreover, the representatives could not go against their constituencies, they would be pledged to specific measures. The different groups would come together each to try to prevail, not to go through the only genuine democratic process, that of trying to integrate their ideas and interests.

When the desire to prevail is once keenly upon us, we behave very differently than when our object is the seeking of truth. Suppose I am the representative in Congress of a group or a party. A bill is under consideration. I see a weakness in that bill; if I point it out some one else may see a remedy for it and the bill may be immensely improved. But do I do this? Certainly not. I am so afraid of the bill being lost if I show any weakness in it that I keep this insight to myself and my country loses just so much. I cannot
believe that occupational representation will foster truth seeking or truth speaking. It seems to me quite a case of the frying pan into the fire. Compromise and swapping will be the order in Parliaments based solely on the vocational principle. The different interests must fight it out in Parliament. This is fundamentally against democracy because it is against the psychological foundation of democracy, the fundamental law of association.
Democracy depends on the blending, not the balancing, of interests and thoughts and wills. Occupational representation assumes that you secure the interests of the whole by securing the interests of every class, the old particularist fallacy transferred to the group.

Moreover, it is often assumed that because the occupational group is composed of men of similar interests we shall have agreement in the occupational group; it is taken for granted that in these economic groups the agreement of opinion necessary for voting will be automatic. But do poets or carpenters or photographers think alike on more than a very few questions? What we must do is to get behind these electoral methods to some fundamental method which shall _produce_ agreement.

Moreover, if the Cabinet were made up of these warring elements, administration would be almost impossible. Lloyd-George's Cabinet at present is hampered by too much "difference." I have throughout,
to be sure, been advocating the compounding of difference as the secret of politics, but the compounding must begin further back in our life than Parliaments or Cabinets.

And if you had group representation in England would not the Cabinet be made up of the most powerful of the groups, and would not a fear of defeat at any particular time mean overtures to enough of the other groups to make success in the Cabinet? And would not an entirely improper amount of power drift to the Premier under these circumstances? Have we any leaders who would, could any one trust himself to, guide the British Cabinet for the best interests of Great Britain under such conditions as these?

To sum up: a true federalism cannot rest on balance or group-rights or consent. Authority, obedience, liberty, can never be understood without an understanding of the group process. Some of the advocates of guild socialism oppose function to authority and liberty, but we can have function _and_ liberty _and_
authority: authority of the whole through the liberty of all by means of the functions of each. These three are inescapably united.
A genuine group, a small or large group, association or state, has the right to the obedience of its members. No group should be sovereign over another group. The only right the state has to authority over "other" groups is as far as those groups are constituent parts of the state. All groups are not constituent
parts of the state to-day, as the pluralists clearly see. Possibly or probably all groups never will be, but such perpetually self-actualizing unity should be the process. Groups are sovereign over themselves, but in their relation to the state they are interdependent groups, each recognizing the claims of every other.
Our multiple group life is the fact we have to reckon with; unity is the aim of all our seeking. And with this unity will appear a sovereignty spontaneously and joyfully acknowledged. In true federalism, voided of division and balance, lies such sovereignty.

The Occupational Group
Chapter XXXII
Political Pluralism (concluded)

I HAVE spoken of the endeavor of the pluralist school to look at things as they are as one of its excellencies. But a progressive political science must also decide what it is aiming at. It is no logical argument against a sovereign state to say that we have not one at present or that our present particularistic states are not successful. Proof of actual plural sovereignty does not constitute an argument against the ideal of unified or rather a unifying sovereignty. The question is do we want a unifying state? And if
so, how can we set about getting it?

The old theory of the monistic state indeed tended to make the state absolute. The pluralists are justified in their fear of a unified state when they conceive it as a monster which has swallowed up everything within sight. It reminds one of the nursery rhyme of one's childhood:
Algy met a bear
The bear was bulgy
The bulge was Algy.

The pluralists say that the monistic state _absorbs_ its members. (This is a word used by many writers) [1]. But the ideal unified state is not all-absorptive; it is all-inclusive -- a very different matter: we are not, individual or group, to be absorbed into a whole, we are to be constituent members of the whole. I am
speaking throughout of the ideal unified state, which I call a unifying state.

1. p 39 note.

The failure to understand a unifying state is responsible for the dread on the one hand of a state which will "demand" our allegiance, and on the other of our being left to the clash of "divided" allegiances. Both these bugbears will disappear only through an understanding of how each allegiance can minister to every other, and also through a realization that no single group can embrace my life. It is true that the state as state no more than family or trade-union or church can "capture my soul." But this does not mean that I must divide my allegiance; I must find how I can by being loyal to each be loyal to all, to the whole. I am an American with all my heart and soul and at the same time I can work daily for Boston and Massachusetts. I can work for my nation through local machinery of city or neighborhood. My work at office or factory enriches my family life; my duty to my family is my most pressing incentive to do my best work. There is no competing here, but an infinite number of filaments cross and recross and connect all my various allegiances. We should not be obliged to choose between our different groups. Competition is not
the soul of true federalism but the interlocking of all interests and all activities.

The true state must gather up every interest within itself. It must take our many loyalties and find how it can make them one. I have all these different allegiances, I should indeed lead a divided and therefore uninteresting life if I could not unify them,
Life _would_ be "just one damned thing after another." The true state has my devotion because it gathers up into itself the various sides of me, is the symbol of my multiple self, is my multiple self brought to significance, to self-realization. If you leave me with my plural selves, you leave me in desolate places, my soul craving its meaning, its home. The home of my soul is in the state.

But the true state does not "demand" my allegiance. It is the spontaneously uniting, the instinctive self-unifying of our multiple interests. And as it does not "demand" allegiance, so also it does not "compete" with trade-unions etc., as the present state often does, for my allegiance. We have been recently told that the tendency of the state is to be intolerant of "any competing interest or faith or hope," but if it is, the cure is not to make it tolerant, but to make it recognize that the very substance of its life is all these interests and faiths and hopes. Every group which we join must increase our loyalty to the state because the state must recognize fully every legitimate interest. Our political machinery must not be such that I get what I need by pitting the group which most clearly embodies my need against the state; it must be such that my loyalty to my trade-union is truly part of my loyalty to the state.

When I find that my loyalty to my group and my loyalty to the state conflict (if I am a Quaker and my country is at war, or if I am a trade-unionist and the commands of nation and trade-union clash at the time of a strike), I must usually, as a matter of immediate action, decide between these loyalties. But my duty to
either group or state is not thereby exhausted: I must, if my disapproval of war is to be neither abandoned nor remain a mere particularist conviction, seek to change the policy of my state in regard to its foreign relations; I must, knowing that there can be no sound national life where trade-unions are pitted against the
state, seek to bring about those changes in our industrial and political organization by which the interests of my trade-union can become a constituent part of the interests of the state.

I feel capable of more than a multiple allegiance, I feel capable of a unified allegiance. A unified allegiance the new state will claim, but that is something very different from an "undivided" allegiance. It is, to use James' phrase again, a compounding of allegiances. "Multiple allegiance" leaves us with the abnormal idea
of competing groups. "Supplementary allegiance" gives us too fragmentary an existence. "Cooperative allegiance" comes nearer the truth. Can we not perhaps imagine a cooperative or unified allegiance, all these various and varying allegiances actually living in and through the other?

We need not fear the state if we could understand it as the unifying power: it is the state-principle when two or three are gathered together, when any differences are harmonized. Our problem is how all the separate community sense and community loyalty and community responsibility can be gathered up into larger community sense and loyalty and control.

One thing more it is necessary to bear in mind in considering the unified state, and that is that a unifying state is not a static state. We, organized as the state, may issue certain commands to ourselves today, but organized as a plastic state, those commands may change to-morrow with our changing needs and changing ideals, and they will change through _our_ initiative. The true state is neither an external force nor an unchanging force. Rooted in our most intimate daily lives, in those bonds which are at the same time the strongest and the most pliant, the "absolutism" of the true state depends always upon _our_ activity. The objectors to the unified state seem to imply that it is necessarily a ready-made state, with hard and fast articulations, existing apart from us, imposing its commands upon us which we must obey; but the truth is
that the state must be in perfect flux and that it is utterly dependent upon us for its appearance. In so far as we actualize it, it appears to us; we recognize that it is wrong, then we see it in a higher form and actualize that. The true state is not an arbitrary creation. It is a process: a continual self-modification to express its different stages of growth which each and all must be so flexible that continual change of form is twin-fellow of continual growth.

But every objection that can be raised against the pluralists does not I believe take from them the right to leadership in political thought.

First, they prick the bubble of the present state's right to supremacy. They see that the state which has been slowly forming since the Middle Ages with its pretenses and unfulfilled claims has not won either our regard or respect. Why then, they ask, should we render this state obedience? "[The state must] prove itself by what it achieves." With the latter we are all beginning to agree.

Genuine power, in the sense not of power actually possessed, but in the sense of a properly evolved power, is, we have seen, an actual psychological process. Invaluable, therefore, is the implicit warning of the pluralists that to attain this power is an infinite task. Sovereignty is always a-growing; our political
forms must keep closely in touch with the specific stage of that growth. In rendering the state obedience, we assume that the state has genuine power (because the consequences of an opposite assumption would be too disastrous) while we are trying to approximate it. The great lesson of Mr. Laski's book is in its
implication that we do not have a sovereign state until we make one. Political theory will not _create_ sovereignty, acts of Parliament cannot _confer_ sovereignty, only living the life will turn us, subjects indeed at present, into kings of our own destiny.

Moreover, recently some of the pluralists are beginning to use the phrase cooperative sovereignty [1] which seems happily to be taking them away from their earlier "strung-along' sovereignty. If they press along this path, we shall all be eager to follow.

1. Mr. Laski, I think.

Secondly, they recognize the value of the group and they see that the variety of our group life to-day has a significance which must be immediately reckoned with in political method. Moreover they repudiate the idea that the groups are given authority by the state. An able political writer recently said, "All other societies rest on the authority given by the state. The state itself stands self-sufficient, self-directing. . . ." It is this school of thought which the pluralists are combating and thereby rendering invaluable service to political theory.

Third, and directly connected with the last point, they plead for a revivification of local life. It is interesting to note that the necessity of this is recognized both by those who think the state has failed and by those who wish to increase the power of the state. To the former, the group is to be the substitute for the
repudiated state. As for the latter, the Fabians have long felt that local units should be vitalized and educated and interested, for they thought that socialism would begin with the city and other local units. Neighborhood education and neighborhood organization is then the pressing problem of 1918. All those who are looking towards a real democracy, not the pretense of one which we have now, feel that the most imminent of our needs is the awakening and invigorating, the educating and organizing of the local unit. All those who in the humblest way, in settlement or community centre, are working for this, are working at the greatest political problem of the twentieth century.

In the fourth place the pluralists see that the interest of the state is not now always identical with the interests of its parts. It is to the interest of England to win this war, they say, but England has yet to prove that it is also for the interest of her working people.

In the fifth place, we may hail the group school as the beginning of the disappearance of the crowd. Many people advocate vocational representation because they see in it a method of getting away from our present crowd rule, what they call numerical representation.
They see our present voters hypnotized by their leaders and manipulated by "interests," and propose the occupational group as a substitute for the crowd. New political experiments must indeed be along this line. We must guard only (1) that the "group" itself shall not be a crowd, (2) that the union of groups shall not be a numerical union.
Finally, this new school contains the prophecy of the future because it has with keenest insight seized upon the problem of identity, of association, of federalism [1], as the central problem of politics as it is the central problem of life. The force of the pluralist school is that it is not academic; it is considering a question which every thoughtful person is asking himself. We are faced to-day with a variety of group interests, with many objects demanding our enthusiasm and devotion; our duty itself shines, not a single light showing a single path, but shedding a larger radiance on a life which is most gloriously not a path at all.
Shall Boston or Washington hold me, my family, my church, my union?
With the complexity of interests increasing every day on the outside, inside with the power of the soul to "belong" expanding every day (the English and the French flags stir us hardly less than the American now), with the psychologists talking of pluralism and the political scientists of multiple sovereignty, with all this
yet the soul of man seeks unity in obedience to his essential nature. How is this to be obtained? Social evolution is in the hands of those who can solve this problem.

1. It does not matter in the terms of which branch of study you express it -- philosophy, sociology, or political science -- it is always the same problem.

What is the law of politics that corresponds in importance to the law of gravitation in the physical world? It is the law of interpenetration and of multiples. I am the multiple man and the multiple man is the germ of the unified state. If I live fully I become so enriched by the manifold sides of life that I cannot be narrowed down to mere corporation or church or trade-union or any other special group. The miracle of spirit is that it can give itself utterly to all these things and yet remain unimpaired, unexhausted, undivided. I am not a serial story to be read only in the different installments of my different groups. We do not give a part to one group and a part to another, but we give our whole to each and the whole remains for every other relation. Life escapes its classifications and this is what some of the writers on group organization do not seem to understand. This secret of the spirit is the power of the federal principle. True federation multiplies
each individual. We have thought that federal government consisted of mechanical, artificial, external forms, but really it is the spirit which liveth and giveth life.

Let the pluralists accept this principle and they will no longer tell us that they are torn by a divided allegiance. Let them carry their pragmatism a step further and they will see that it is only by actual living that we can understand an undivided allegiance. James tells us that "Reality falls in passing into conceptual
analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life -- it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates." This is the way we must understand an undivided allegiance. I live forever the undivided life. As an individual I am the undivided one, as the group-I, I am again the undivided one, as the state-I, I am the undivided one -- I am always and forever the undivided one, mounting from height to height, always mounting, always the whole of me mounting.